Here we are almost two weeks into Ramadan already, hasn’t it flown by?
The roads have been nice and quiet when we have been commuting to work at 7am and homeward bound around 3ish.
However, you do not want to be on the roads around dusk when the hungry chaps are trying to get home in time for Iftar.
It is a holy and family time for most Muslims and they try to avoid travelling to ensure that they can always be with the family each night.
It is also a quietish time for us expats, with all our favourite haunts closed for the month. It is a time for us to engage in homely pastimes and activities.
It is a good time to visit old friends in their homes and pass a pleasant evening in good humoured discussion over a repast.
We thought we should organise an event for a quiet Friday and invite along a few friends to liven things up.
As I have many years experience of hosting trivia quizzes, it was decided to do one of these.
So I began setting a few rounds of appropriate questions, and out of habit, I check some of the answers on Wikipedia to ensure that they are still correct. For example the last time I used the question “which planet is furthest from the sun” the answer was Pluto, but Pluto has been downgraded and so the answer is now Neptune.
This is where the problem began. Once I see something that piques my interest I click and that takes me to something else. I click, and click and click and so on. The next thing I know its three hours later and I have still not got the quiz set.
I’m back!
I wrote the above an hour ago as I went to look up Neptune and ended up all over the universe.
Did you know you can remember the order of the planets by remembering the phrase “Mother visits every Monday just stays until noon” (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune).
I am just so easily distracted, and I curse Sir Tim Berners Lee for inventing the hyperlink and making it oh so easy to wander off into cyberland.
A hyperlink is the text which is normally in blue and if you move your mouse over it the pointer changes to a finger and the text underlines. This means that if you click it you are taken to another page.
The interesting thing about links is that if you right click on them then you get a list of options and if you select “inspect element” you will open a window showing you how the link is coded in HTML which is the language that Sir Tim invented in 1990 – and thus the World Wide Web was born.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
The jury is still out.
Ramadan Kareem.
Jackie@JBeedie.com